One Name, Several Men, One Combined Memory

The Walters Art Museum's own catalogue record for this sculpture includes an admission worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over: later Tibetan Buddhist tradition merged several historical figures who separately carried the name Nagarjuna into one combined memory, the second century philosopher who founded Madhyamaka thought folded together with at least one later tantric master of the same name, and the resulting composite figure was elevated to the status of a mahasiddha, a "great perfected one" credited with extraordinary powers well beyond philosophical argument.

This is not a modern scholarly correction imposed on an older, purer tradition. It is how the tradition itself has long remembered him, and this seventeenth century sculpture was made well inside that combined memory rather than before it formed. An inscription on the base names the figure by his Tibetan name, Ludrub, and records that the sculptor Tsapa Namgyal made the piece on commission for an unnamed senior monk, a small, specific act of patronage sitting underneath a much larger, blended legend. Reading that inscription and the museum's own honest note together is a useful reminder that a single devotional image can carry a genuinely layered history without any of it being a forgery or a mistake, simply a tradition doing what long religious memory usually does.